All in one photo

 Pereira, Netrebko, Kaufmann, Mehta, Bartoli, Salsi.

This is from May in Salzburg and shows all of my long time opera loves in one photo.  They were also all in the same performance of Tosca.  Is it a coincidence that they are the most beautiful people in opera?  I think not.

Un Ballo in Maschera from Munich

Conductor:  Zubin Mehta
Production:  Johannes Erath

Riccardo:  Piotr Beczala (tenor)
Renato, Riccardo's best friend:  George Petean (baritone)
Amelia, wife of Renato:  Anja Harteros (soprano)
Ulrica:  Okka von der Damerau (contralto)
Oscar, Riccardo's page:  Sofia Fomina (coloratura soprano)

The Bayerische Staatsoper brought us Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera in a manner we might have expected.  The whole thing takes place in Riccardo's bedroom.  This must surely indicate that it's all a dream.  The It's all a Dream staging is certainly one of the more annoying.  My most recent one of these was Falstaff from Florence.  Interestingly, that was also conducted by Mehta.  Everything is in black and white, and the stage is a bit dark for a stream.

I watched this out of order, middle first, followed by beginning, so I noticed that the woman with long blond hair that appears mysteriously at the beginning is Ulrica the witch.  Throughout this opera a lot is going on.  The male chorus is divided into two groups:  those friendly to Riccardo and those who are conspiring to kill him.  For the first time in my experience they are both labeled and translated in the subtitles.  If you watched without text, you wouldn't guess this.

I didn't realize before this that Riccardo so dominates the action.  No excuse.  He appears in various guises:  as himself, as a dead body uncovered by Ulrica lying on his own bed, and as a ventriloquist dummy, sometimes operated by Oscar and sometimes by Riccardo himself.  Piotr sings, dummy's mouth moves.  If this means something, I didn't guess it.  I thought ventriloquists were completely out of style.  I'm surprised by what a wonderful role this is for Piotr.

Now we wake up in Renato's bedroom where he is in bed with Amelia.  Ulrica is here, too.  We're supposed to be in a field with a gallows.  Anja sings her aria.  I didn't realize Oscar actually has a bigger part.  Riccardo appears, which is fine if we're in a field but iffy when we're in Renato's bedroom.  He sleeps through the whole thing.  Renato wakes up during the love duet.  The lovers spot him, and Amelia gets back in bed and covers up.  This is rather spectacularly silly, but the plot is actually more plausible if Renato is a lot more boring than Dmitri.

I have loved the music.  Harteros may be by now my favorite current Verdi singer, though this is not the best role for her.

Ulrica is still with us at the end.
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Falstaff in Florence

Direttore: Zubin Mehta
Regia: Luca Ronconi
Scene: Tiziano Santi

Sir John Falstaff: Ambrogio Maestri
Fenton: Yijie Shi
Ford, marito d'Alice: Roberto De Candia
Mrs. Alice Ford: Eva Mei
Nannetta, figlia d'Alice: Ekaterina Sadovnikova
Mrs. Quickly: Elena Zilio
Mrs. Meg Page: Laura Polverelli
Bardolfo: Gianluca Sorrentino
Pistola: Mario Luperi
Dr. Cajus: Carlo Bosi

We wanted very much to see the new opera house in Florence, so we booked ourselves for Falstaff in Florence on Tuesday.  We thought we would see Roberto De Candia as Falstaff until the replacement with Ambrogio Maestri was announced. 

I included the picture above to give you an idea of the production.  This is from the second scene where the ladies have received their letters and are planning their revenge.  It is possible to interpret this production as Falstaff's dream.  It begins with him in bed and ends the same way.  He is lying in bed when the oak tree descends to hang over the bed.

There is a flock of geese on the stage at one point, stuffed, of course.  Then later the women pluck at the feathers on the geese.  Chi e?



Maestri is huge, just as Sir John needs to be.  He sings huge as well.  Perhaps you might be impressed with his enormous size after all.  He is glorious.

I enjoyed very much the "reverenza" of Mrs. Quickly.  My only complaint about the ladies was that their costumes were too similar to be able to distinguish them.  Nannetta was also lovely with a very nice high pianissimo.

It is good to hear Verdi in Italy.  It is an endless surprise.  In Falstaff the violins played with an almost constant leggiero technique, making it truly sound like a buffa opera.  That means they played with the sense of tiny spaces between the notes, creating an atmosphere of lightness and frivolity.  People constantly talk about late Verdi resembling Wagner to the point that our orchestras then play it as though it actually were Wagner.  All Verdi is still Italian, and it might be well for us to remember it on occasion.  Kudos to Maestro Mehta.

It was difficult to tell if the theater was completely finished.  The production did not require any elaborate stage machinery.  Our one complaint was that in the balcony a thin line of steel runs across the middle of one's view of the stage. 

Go see some Verdi in Italy.

Tristan and Isolde

It is too soon to declare victory, but my Tristan and Isolde DVD from the Munich state opera came today, and I have successfully made it through the first two acts. The best thing about this DVD is the presence of Waltraud Meier in the role of Isolde. With her long flowing red hair and her great beauty she seems actually to be an Irish princess. She also brings a lot of passionate emotion to the role. When King Mark calls her a miraculous woman, we can believe him.


The production is fun. The first act looks like a cruise ship with deck chairs and odd looking wispy clouds that float past. The fatal drinks are in colored plastic glasses with decorated bent straws. Fun. Why not fall in love on a cruise ship? The business about Tristan shaving seems a little forced. He wears shaving cream through the first act. He can't come to talk to Isolde because he's busy shaving.

The tenor on this video is Jon Fredric West, the same tenor who sang Apollo in Daphne at Kennedy Center last year. He is a heldentenor and was the only one of the cast of Daphne capable of blasting over the orchestra in the bad acoustics of the Kennedy Center concert hall. Maybe it's "squillo", but the heldentenor must have a knife-like edge to his voice to cut through the rumble of the orchestra and properly resonate the narrow German vowels.

The second act opens in a red and blue forest, and when Tristan enters, he brings a yellow sofa with pink flowers that looks like it came from Cost Plus or Viking Trader. It would help if they looked like they were in love.

I think I will make it all the way to the end, and may acquire enough curiosity about the music to want to hear parts of it with other voices, but I don't think I will ever overcome the fact that I don't really care for this lugubrious music with its complete lack of any square corners. I tried to think of a way to say this, and that's all I came up with. I don't experience the unresolved tension; for me it's simply shapeless.

Part II

Now suddenly it's the third act and the set is tan and barren with a slide show of unknown people playing on the back wall. How annoying. We're doing two operas, apparently: Deck chairs and bright colors for falling in love, black and tan for tragedy and death.

Would I recommend this to anyone? Not really. It is lovely to see Waltraud Meier, and she also sings well. But I don't think I enjoy listening to Jon Fredric West. As the opera goes on, his part gets bigger and bigger. Maybe that's why I never make it to the end.

Victory! Isolde when she comes is worth the wait. The Liebestod, filmed entirely in close-up, is marvelous, and she is truly gorgeous. Kurt Moll as the King is also very moving and intense. Maybe you could rent it from Netflix.

In the bows at the end of this opera the entire orchestra came up onto the stage together with the conductor, Zubin Mehta, to take a bow. I cannot recall ever seeing this before.
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Tosca movie

Jean and I were watching the Tosca movie with Placido Domingo and Catherine Malfitano, and Jean said "Dump that woman!" This was a terrible shock. "But Jean, Mario is the one who drags them down by getting involved in politics. If he dumps Tosca, he's still dead."

I love Catherine Malfitano's Tosca. She is so wonderfully out there. Tosca is supposed to be an opera singer. She is maddeningly jealous and passionate. And she leaps to her death in style.

This movie is famous for the wonderful cinematography used to film the locations in Rome. But it isn't just for pictures--the singing and acting are also very fine.

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